[Trace14]

Do you ever get so mad with yourself that you can't stand being in your own skin? Just out of the blue this rage comes over that makes me so mad about how my life has changed, getting older, have no control over my thoughts and emotions. It makes me very angry sometimes.

[Open Eyes]

Yes, I have that challenge myself. There is a lot of anger and frustration that comes with PTSD.

Someone presented me with a possibility that I might have some "fixer" issues. I have been mulling it over in my mind. I think that when one is growing up and there is dysfunction in their home, one of the things that develops is a desire to find a way to fix it. I think that is a part of human nature in that there is a deep desire to try to fix our environment so we can feel safer.

I think that what trauma does is it overwhelms someone to a point where that person totally loses their own sense of direction in how that person "fixes" things so they can feel a personal sense of safety.

I think that what someone can do is think about whatever they wanted to fix and how that deep desire set them on a path of overcoming and whatever that person gained was severely affected.

I think the "fixer" mentality has contributed a lot of mankind overall. I have to say that I am grateful that someone, even a few people decided to see what the problem was when it came to children with learning disabilities and how one can help them learn and develop and be productive in spite of whatever that person struggles with when that person is expected to learn a certain way. A lot of humans pursue psychology because of a deep desire to "help" other human beings learn how to overcome whatever is challenging them so they can get back on track with gaining a sense of direction in their life.

Maybe, if one steps back and makes a personal effort to see whatever that person was trying to fix, and all the ways that person put effort into that desire, it can prove helpful in recognizing the things they wanted to fix but could not simply because whatever it was, was beyond their capacity to fix. That can be a challenge in that human beings are designed to have a strong desire to fix whatever they can to make things better. All one has to do is look at human history and how far we have come as a species.

If I think about my own history one of the things that most definitely profoundly affected me is witnessing how horribly my older brother was treated, and later learned it was because he struggled with a learning disability. I had always knew what was happening to him was wrong, actually today it would be considered "child abuse". Because what I saw was so horrible and I wanted to do something to "help" him in some way, I became a person who wanted to "help" others, especially children.

What ended up shattering me was when everything I had put into my own effort to do so was invaded, disrespected, destroyed to a point where I was overwhelmed with a great deal of loss. To top that off when I broke down into what I later learned was a post traumatic breakdown, I was treated like my loss should not have meant as much as it did to me.

I think one of the components to what is labelled "complex" PTSD comes from a person's history where something that person experienced affected them deeply and what was born out of that was a desire to find a way to "fix" it. It is important to realize how this is very much a part of human nature itself, it's been a huge part of how we not only survived as a species, but thrived and kept gaining in how we gained more control of our environment so we could have more available to us that increased our quality of life.

When I read about your history Trace, I can see a young girl who's entire life and personal sense of safety changed that day your grandfather traumatically lost his life.

That event changed your entire family and somehow you developed a deep desire to figure out how to "fix" that. When I read about what you share of your history, there was one constant thing you addressed which was "tragedy" that no one stopped, and you certainly saw a great deal of that. What is so interesting to me is how when you were so young you were prevented from seeing, and you became the one who was often there to address a trauma and at the same time remove it so that others would not be traumatized. You were very strong in your capacity to do that too. What changed that for you is when the individual who was in that "scene" of trauma was someone very close to you. You are in a very different position with this because you are in that position that your father was in that he struggled to the depths of himself not knowing how to overcome that. It's understandable because as you are learning a tragic event that affects someone in such a personal way is very hard for "any" human being. You have the two sides of human tragedy now. This has added something to all the things you witnessed in your past. None of the things you experienced that revolved around a major trauma were things you could prevent. That is a very challenging reality to find one's way of finally radically accepting. Many of the tragedies you witness showed you that human beings "do" end their own lives. And often nothing prevents this.

When we are children we need our parents to have the answers so we can feel "safe". However, parents are just people and they simply don't have the answers to everything, how to fix things, make them better. Often one can look back on their childhood and see all the things our parents simply did know how to fix. Actually, as a parent myself, I faced so many challenges while raising my own child and I did not have "all" the answers. I just did the best I could and I was not perfect, I faced things I had not expected and really did not know how to fix/handle.

The important part of your own healing is to realize these horrible events are not events where these individuals did not care about others, they were just individuals who did not want to suffer whatever they were suffering. So, what comes next is "healing" and finding one's way to maybe contribute to "prevention of". This is something that a lot of human beings are putting their effort into in our world of humanity right now.

[Open Eyes]

I just wanted to add something important. From what I have learned about you, I see someone who wanted to fix something but in taking on that task you did not have a lot invested in yourself. That tends to be something I have noticed about a lot of the individuals that come to this forum and share their challenge looking for support.

One of the challenges, that I struggle with myself, is learning how to finally turn efforts into "self". I think this is a big part of the "I am extremely angry, mad at myself". I think this has a lot to do with growing up with parents that were self absorbed and failed to nurture their child/children as adults. This contributes a lot to how that child begins to become more focused on "fixing" outside of themselves, and often that includes taking on some kind of role of "parenting the parent".

One of the things I noticed about your particular challenge is "did he not love "me" enough?",and "how could he do this to me?". This is a very deep emotional challenge and I struggle with this challenge myself, I have noticed that a lot of the others that interact here also struggle with this challenge even though the history varies. Well, the reality is how that individual/parent never achieved that level of maturity. If you really look back, that was always in the picture in your history. Also, a lot of parents get married very young where they have not really grown into adults. Add into that the fact that the role of healthy parenting was something "lacking" in a lot of generations. This is most definitely a contributing factor to many of the tragedies you addressed in your history.

If you sit and read so many different challenges expressed on this site, the common thread is "lack of healthy nurturing". So many describe "negative/critical" voices in their heads, I have them myself tbh, well, that is an indication of how so many different individuals received "negative" messages in their childhoods.

[shakespeare47]

@ the OP. Yeah, I can relate.

[reb569]

Originally Posted by Trace14

Do you ever get so mad with yourself that you can't stand being in your own skin? Just out of the blue this rage comes over that makes me so mad about how my life has changed, getting older, have no control over my thoughts and emotions. It makes me very angry sometimes.

Yes I very often get angry at myself. The final stage of my "vicious circle of stress" is very often excessive self anger. But I often am angry with myself when I am in my depression after the stress breaks, although the anger has a different tone, it's more self-defeating, while when I'm extremely stressed it's self-hatred.

I often wonder if I don't actually have BPD, but then I remember that is a common misdiagnosis of CPTSD.